Scruples Two (20 page)

Gigi closed her eyes tightly while he looked at her, panting with impatience, breathless with expectation, but unable to free herself from this inquisition until she started to move her hips from side to side on the bed in an instinctively languid cadence of such seduction that it made him forget his curiosity.

As soon as she felt him loosen his grip, she launched herself at him abruptly, opening her legs and pushing herself forward so that he found his penis imprisoned by her warm thighs. He laughed at her impulsiveness and drew back so that he could caress her between her legs and open her properly. He traced a path through the silky, curly thicket of her gentle mound, trailing his fingers purposefully down to the lips he intended to see with his own eyes before he entered them. Gigi closed her eyes again, at his touch, clenching her teeth and writhing on the bed with such intensity that he caught fire from her eagerness and could resist no longer. He took his firm, quivering penis in his hand and thrust it all the way into her with one quick, brutal shove, too inflamed by her avidity to hold back. She was tight, he thought, because she was so small, and that was the last lucid thought he had as the movements of her body responded to his. She bit his shoulder until she drew blood as she met his relentlessness with an equal relentlessness of her own, urging him on quickly in the grip of an attack of such impetuous passion that it astonished him, experienced as he was. He tried to hold back, not sure if she was ready, but she didn’t allow him any hesitation, using her body at a breakneck pace, mercilessly, even clumsily, but to such potent effect that soon he was rearing and bucking in the grip of a vast and irresistible orgasm.

Exhausted, he fell away from Gigi’s body and lay speechless on the bed. Finally he gasped in weary admiration, “You really go after what you want, don’t you?” When she didn’t answer, he looked at her through his half-open eyes, and saw the unmistakable, flushed, expectant, suffused face of an unsatisfied woman. “Oh, shit.… you didn’t … I’m sorry …”

“I didn’t but I will … you’re not going anywhere,” Gigi said, hugging him. “I’m sorry I bit you.”

“Don’t do that again, that hurt.”

“I won’t have to … next time … it was only so I wouldn’t scream with the pain of it.”

Quentin sat up abruptly. “What the fuck? Wait a minute—what’s that?” He pointed accusingly at the small bloodstain on the bed.

“What does it look like?” Gigi asked, tremendously pleased with herself.

“It looks like you are the biggest liar I’ve ever met,” he said furiously.

“Most likely,” she agreed happily, “most likely.”

“But what about the bloody fucking rock band? What were they, all girls?”

“Oh, Quentin, don’t be so literal-minded,” Gigi giggled, smoothing back the hair that fell over his forehead. “I happen to loathe rock.”

“Oh God, what have I got into?” he cried. “What are you, you greedy little bitch, fourteen?”

“Certainly not!” she said with spicy indignation. “I’m well past the age of consent, there’s nothing to worry about. Now why don’t you lie down and take a little nap? You look as if you need it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Gigi took the precaution of locking the two doors to her suite and hiding the key. Quentin was sound asleep with an expression of satisfaction on his ineffably lean, long, alluring features before she tiptoed with a slightly wincing step into the bathroom. As she ran a warm bath she trusted would soothe her various bruised, sprained and stinging parts, she hummed a rollicking counterpoint to Tony Bennett singing “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” All things considered, Gigi decided, she wouldn’t tell Maze. She was too old now to reveal everything that happened to her. And the night had just begun.

If this was Gigi’s idea of flirting, he gave up, Burgo thought as he watched her obediently scraping carrots and chopping celery and learning how to plunge a tomato into hot water before peeling off its skin, a minor trick she had demonstrated for him three years ago. He gave up completely; the whole silly, childish thing was none of his business, and since Gigi was so backward that she thought playing the idiot in the kitchen was the way to attract a fellow, he washed his hands of it. There had been nothing to worry about after all. He’d been afraid, for a bad half hour, that she’d learned a thing or two from Mrs. Ikehorn, a woman who wouldn’t pussyfoot around peeling shallots when she had designs on a man, from what he’d heard about her past, but little Gigi was making no progress at all in that particular direction, thank the good Lord. He was the last person who had any intention of telling her what she was doing wrong.

Josie Speilberg, from her office, knew everything that went on in the house, and she was gratified to hear that the new chef had continued Gigi’s cooking lessons. There was always more to learn in an evolving discipline like cooking, each chef had his own techniques, and a dedicated student like Gigi could count on soaking up something important from each new teacher who came her way. She wished Jean-Luc could see that Gigi’s interest in cooking hadn’t diminished because he’d withdrawn his presence. As she always said, no one was indispensable.

As for the rest of the staff, they were so accustomed to seeing Gigi in the kitchen that they had long ago stopped asking what she was working on. All cooking seemed to involve identical preparation; only the results interested them.

Billy returned from Munich and spent a few days in Los Angeles before going on to Hawaii, where another Scruples had been built to take advantage of the huge business to be done with people on vacation and the growing troops of affluent, fashion-conscious Japanese travelers.

Billy had planned to take Gigi with her on this trip, and then on to visit the Scruples in Hong Kong. She didn’t like to be separated from Gigi for long, but apparently all the poor child truly craved, after the excitement and tension of her senior year, was to stay put at home, like a frog on a log, basking in an orgy of all-out laziness, sleeping hours later than she’d ever slept before, mooching around the kitchen as usual, swimming languidly every afternoon and slowly recovering from the strain of getting into college. She’d been accepted at Smith and Vassar and Berkeley, but she’d decided to go to UCLA, to Billy’s joy and relief.

As they lunched together, Billy observed Gigi closely and noticed how graduating from high school had changed her. Of course, graduation was one of the great rites of passage, Billy thought, noting a new and endearingly high-spirited happiness in Gigi’s manner, a new brilliance in her eyes, a heightened color on her tanned cheeks. Gigi seemed to have grown up in just a few weeks, which was clearly impossible, an optical illusion, but on returning from Munich she had been struck by it. Gigi had a sweetly thriving tartness about her that was new, a playfully minx-like quality that was new, a way of moving that was newly supple, a … a
female
quality that was new.

“Gigi,” Billy asked, shocked by a sudden, terrible suspicion, “have you been
eating
more than usual?”

“Probably,” Gigi admitted. “In fact, that’s just about all I seem to do. Lazy as I am, I haven’t missed a meal.”

“My God! Darling, you’ve simply got to just watch it! You can’t afford to get fat, and with your delicate bones even a few extra pounds will show. You may think you can get away with it, but believe me, when you don’t exercise and you eat normally, it just adds up, until one day …” Billy shuddered at the awful possibility of a fat Gigi. “You happen to look particularly adorable at the moment, that extra weight is still becoming, but there’s a thin line between blooming and being overblown, and you’ve got to promise me never,
ever
to cross it.”

“I promise, Billy, on my honor, I’ll start counting calories. If you don’t have to go to Scruples today, I’ll beat you at tennis, just to show you I can still sweat with the best.”

“You’re on,” Billy agreed immediately. If there was one thing she dreaded for Gigi, it was the traditional weight gain of college freshmen. She’d really have to watch her closely to make sure it didn’t happen, counting calories or not. Gigi wasn’t diminutive or tiny or short or petite or any of the other words that might have been used in honesty to describe her insignificant person when she’d first arrived from New York, Billy decided with the true impartiality she always gave to such vital assessments. Gigi had grown enough, just exactly enough, to be, in her slender way, quite, quite perfect. Actual inches were less important than proportion, and Gigi was so well proportioned that she gave the impression of being taller than she really was, especially since she held herself with such upright, all-but-regal assurance. Still, she’d always been able to eat as much as she wanted, and everybody knew that such a state was possible only for the very young, a description that, somehow sadly, in spite of its inevitability, no longer fit Gigi at all.

While Billy was away, Gigi and Quentin sneaked up the back service staircase in the main wing to reach Gigi’s rooms on the deserted corridor. During Billy’s return they’d found other places to make love each night: the changing rooms in the tennis pavilion, where they threw dozens of thick towels on the floor to create a bed, and the storeroom in the orchid house, where bags of peat moss made a soft banquette and the controlled humidity and temperature were so perfect that they could lie naked and feel that they were in a forest.

Gigi was in a perpetual state of the obsession of first love, on a merry-go-round that never stopped, her head whirling, her heart yearning. During the day, too restless to read, indifferent to all her former friends, she lived in a state of breathless expectation as she waited for her cooking lesson, knowing that Quentin would soon be bending over her, showing her how to properly manipulate the blade of a chopping knife or the sharp edge of a potato peeler, for she was the most awkward, slow and ungifted of possible pupils.

He had to clasp his hand over hers a hundred times before she could learn how to crack an egg cleanly, without stabbing the yolk open with the jagged shell, and when it came time to scramble the eggs he had to stand behind her and demonstrate at length before she began to understand the coordination of grasping the pan and the spoon and the scraping, lifting, stirring motion that would keep the eggs from sticking.

In fact Gigi was unable to begin to attempt the simplest cooking technique until Quentin made physical contact with her, until he started to breathe too quickly and became mixed up in his instructions. Then she would discover that she needed to go find something in the storage pantry and he would follow her helplessly, knowing that they would stand there with their arms wrapped around each other, lost in a world of perilous kisses until the lesson was forgotten and all he could think about for the rest of the day was the coming night.

Gigi was in love with all her heart, and Quentin, who was in love with only half his heart, recognized the difference from the distance of the eight years that separated them. It seemed to him that he had not had a minute to himself to think the situation over clearly since it had begun, a month ago. He scarcely recognized himself, physically enslaved as he was to this eighteen-year-old sorceress who reigned over him with such a sovereign assumption of her domination that he wouldn’t know how to dispute it even if he wanted to. Every night, night after night, he found himself rising to heights of sexual pleasure that he hadn’t believed existed, and yet, during the next day, Gigi could so easily make him want her again, even when he swore to himself that just once he would manage to resist her, for once she wouldn’t have her own way.

Gigi knew no limits, he thought, but he was a grown man of twenty-six who knew full well that limits existed and he was overreaching them.

In the mornings, back in his own room, rushing to get dressed and go downstairs to prepare breakfast, Quentin Browning realized that he was in danger of forgetting his own name, much less his plans for his clearly organized future. He was getting in over his head, he warned himself, and then lost his rational morning thoughts in the course of the day, as the night approached and Gigi’s wonderfully low laugh sounded and Gigi’s teasing green eyes enticed him, robbing him of any common sense.

One morning, early, Quentin took one of the house cars and went to Gelson’s to do the shopping for a party that Billy was having the next day, before she left for Hawaii. He took the opportunity of finding himself alone for a few hours to try to sort out the situation in which he had so unexpectedly found himself.

Yes, Gigi was an enchantment.… but. Many buts. It wasn’t merely that she wasn’t nineteen yet, it was everything else about her: her gypsy mother and her gypsy past, her film-producer father, her incomprehensibly rich stepmother, all the people who had formed her, all the life experience that had created a girl who was, to him, an exotic plant that could flourish only in Hollywood.

They had no future at all, supposing that he were to dream of offering her one, he told himself, thinking clearly. He was pointed firmly in the direction of the life of a hotel owner who lived most of the year at the rhythm of a demanding business. A sound life, a fruitful, useful and interesting life for him, but Gigi could have no place in it.

When he married, he would expect his wife to help him in a steady, reliable, dependable way as he shouldered the burdens that lay ahead. She’d have to learn all the things his mother knew: become an accomplished chatelaine, able to hire and fire, able to oversee everything from the most mundane details of the linen supply to the greeting of favored clients and their comfortable placement in their preferred rooms. And she’d have to be happy doing this, year in and year out, leading an honest and responsible life, a happy life but one that lacked much fantasy or freedom. That was simply the way it was.

Gigi? Able to function like that? Gigi, his spoiled, impulsive, romantic, imaginative little sweetheart? Gigi, who could and always would choose to do anything that caught her fancy? Gigi, who was just starting out on her adventures, whose life was one vast potential—how could Gigi settle down now, when every option was open to her, settle down as he must settle down, settle down for good? Her years at college lay ahead, the whole wide world lay open to her.